The Hudson Bay Company has been in the fur business since 1670. Today at the Hudson's Bay Store in the Byward Market, a group of people called Live Ark who are vegan and vegetarian activists were protesting against the Hudson Bay Company selling real fur products such as coats and scarves.

A pimply-faced protestor was talking into a microphone, trying to detail the horrific slaughter of animals. He was droning on and on endlessly. When I heard and saw the protest, I crossed a street to see what they were saying.

As a part of the protest group, some guy was dressed up as the Grim Reaper with a skull mask. Other young people held up signs saying "Murder" and other blood spattered epigrams.

Ottawa is a different city. It is very close to the land. As I was crossing the street, I saw another young man yell at the group. He said "Shut the eff up. I am going to shoot a moose and feed it to you people raw". That shocked the pimply-faced guy with the mike and the loudspeaker into silence.

When we were kids, our family had "The Golden Book Encyclopedia" as a source of reference in the home. We also had the "Art Linkletter Picture Encyclopedia For Boys and Girls". Both of them were short on photos and long on hand-drawn graphics. Everything was an artist's representation. However the quality of illustration was higher and more consistent in the Golden Book Encyclopedia.

In both, I read about Johnny Appleseed who walked about America in the pre-Revolutionary days, with a bag of apple seeds, planting apples where ever he went.

That was inspiration for me. Throughout my life, I have always returned any fruit seeds that I happened to be eating, back to the soil. Where most people would put cherry pits in the garbage, I scattered them outdoors. I did the same for any type of fruit that I thought would grown.

In the tropics, I collect the seeds of tropical fruit and scatter them around my home. I have been there a short time only, so I don't know if I have grown any trees. However, recently we bought some tangerines that are mostly seeds. They are in the bag above. Included are seeds of grapefruit, orange, mandarin and lemon. Don't be surprised if in a few years, on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, it is littered with tangerine trees.

It was a beautiful November Sunday in the hills. The Lovely One and I went for a hike near the village of Wakefield. We didn't mean to end up in the village, but that is where the trail that we were hiking on took us. Pictured above is the train station in Wakefield.

On the main street was a cafe called Le Hibou (French for The Owl). The original Cafe Le Hibou was a famous Canadian landmark where many Canadian folksingers of the 1970's were started. We poked our heads into the cafe. The entire place is decorated in retro tables and chairs.

What immediately caught my attention, was a singer songwriter sitting in a well lighted window, with an incredibly authentic voice, crooning the blues as well as other favourites while strumming a big Gibson guitar. The sound was captivating. Just by chance the local newspaper was there and immediately posted an online bit:

The singer songwriter's name was Missy Burgess. She was an incarnation of a female Tom Waits. It is rare that I get "grabbed" by a sound. We looked around the cafe and stepped back out to continue our hike. Instead of doing just that, we went back into Le Hibou, sat by the fire and ordered hot chocolate, while enjoying Missy singing her songs.

I bought one of her CD's and it is eminently listenable. She not only croons a good ballad, but she has the soul of a blues singer. This is a scan of the CD that I bought.

Like the other songwriter that I have profiled on Cosmological Cabbage -- Paul Grady, Missy deserves fame and fortune for her talent.

Yesterday, I was repairing a leak in the garage roof. I was using tar paper that was made with fiberglass fibers. The work gloves that I had were too bulky. So I used my bare hands. Big mistake. The tar paper shed tiny microscopic shards of glass that stuck into my skin. It was painful. You couldn't see the particles. They were that small.

I tried washing my hands. To no avail. I tried scrubbing them with a pot scrubber. It made the little shards go deeper into my skin. I tried using rough coarse salt as a scrubbing agent. I tried immersing my hands in olive oil to float off the shards. It didn't work. I tried skin lotion and liquid soap.

Finally, I soaked my hands for half an hour in the bathtub with the hottest water that I could stand. This was to open up the pores. Then I dipped my wet hands in whole wheat flour. The flour clung to my hands. I started rubbing my hands together, and the flour clumped and turned to dough. It still stuck to my hands. I had to roll the dough around until it formed up into a real resilient, plasticine-like consistency. As I rubbed it around it clung to my skin, and it removed the fiberglass shards from my skin.

Problem solved. Another little life hack. Next time, I will wear gloves.

Oh the irony. Every year, the Bahamas National Trust has Christmas Jollification. I had never heard of the word Jollification before I landed in the Bahamas. I attended Jollification last year. It is one huge Christmas festival and craft sale. It is held in the National Trust Retreat which is an acreage in the middle of Nassau chock-a-block full of tropical trees and plants resembling a botanical gardens mixed with a jungle. I am a member of the Bahamas National Trust, and the weekend is always a blast.

In years past, all of the booze was free, and it was all you can drink. It was really a jollification. Last year and this year, the booze is still free, but you just get a taste. Of course, you can buy more, but the unlimited tap ended.

This year, I am not in Nassau at the moment, and missing Jollification. However, I am getting the cold and winter wonderland, something that never comes to Nassau.

On other fronts:

Cosmological Cabbage is tipping again with an big increase in blog hits the past two days. Thank you.

Lace front wigs are wigs worn with a wig cap that are glued to the head, and the hair can be parted anywhere to look like a natural head of hair. Women who use these, do not have to use hair straightener (which is essentially caustic lye) or any harsh chemicals to get straight hair. But to put a lace front wig on a baby -- PURE GHETTO !!!

The Lovely One and I went out to dinner last night at a bistro that is owned by the operator of Boucanerie Chelsea or in English, Chelsea Smokehouse. There is an interesting connection between Boucanerie and pirates. From Wikipedia:

The buccaneers were pirates who attacked Spanish and French shipping in the Caribbean Sea during the late 17th century. The term buccaneer is now used generally as a synonym for pirate. The term buccaneer derives from the Arawak word buccan, a wooden frame for smoking meat, hence the French word boucane and the name boucanier for French hunters who used such frames to smoke meat from feral cattle and pigs on Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). English colonists anglicised the word boucanier to buccaneer.

The bistro last night served smoked goodies incorporated into the food. For example, the Lovely One ate a pave (a paving stone) of smoked salmon on a bed of greens with squash. I had a penne rigatte with smoked ham in sauce. It was delicious. We wanted a glass of wine to go with our meal. I spied a Portuguese wine called Adega de Pegoes, and more specifically Adega de Pegões Colheita Seleccionada Branco.

In spite of the fact that we ordered just a glass, they brought the bottle to the table. When we tasted the wine, it was so good that we insisted on them leaving the bottle. It is an amazing wine. It went extremely well with the hearty food.

Here are the notes from the winery itself on this wine:

Adega of Pegões Selected Harvest White Wine

Pegões is distinguished by a unique “Terroir”. It is characterized by the combination of poor sandy soils rich in water, with the Mediterranean climate on the proximity of the Atlantic sea. This combination creates a perfect harmony, that brings a excellent environment to the development of our noble grapes.

Classification: Regional Terras of Sado Wine

Type: White

Grapes: Chardonnay 25%, Arinto 25%, Pinot Blamc 25% and Antão Vaz 25%

Region: Península of Setúbal

Soil Type: Sandy Pozolitic

Wine Production: Depends of the harvest

Oenologist: Jaime Quendera

Characteristics:

Taste Note:

Colour: Citrine/Straw.

Aroma: Very fruit, fresh, presenting great harmony with wood.

Taste: Structured wine.

After Taste: Fresh persistent aftertaste.

Vinification: Light pelicular maceration followed by fermentation in Inox vats.

Aging: 3 mouths in American Oak barrels with Batonage.

Evolution: Keep in very good conditions for 3-5 years.

Analysis:

Alcool Content: 13.5% vol

Total Acidity: 6.0 gr. of tartaric acid

Residual Sugar: 3,5 gr/dm3

pH: 3.20

Recommended plates: Strong fish plates as potful, shellfish on the oven and with some cheese.

Recommended Temperature: 14º C.

Conservation: Fresh place with bottle lying down.

History:

Created at 1999 with the finality to convert into wine some new castles on our region. This is a modern product on the market of White Wine with Fermentation on Wood.

The vintage of 2001 as won the silver medal in “Challenge International du Vin 2002” in Bordeaux, in Portugal wan the “Best White wine of the Península of Setúbal 2002” and a gold medal on the same contest.

Harvest of 2002- Silver medal on the “Challenge International du Vin 2003”, in Bordeux; in Portugal wan the “Best White wine of the Península of Setúbal 2003” and a gold medal on the same contest.

Harvest of 2004 - Silver medal on the “International Wine Challenge 2005” and on the “Decanter World Wine Awards 2005” in London.

The taste of this wine called be called "creamy" because it was allowed to rest on the lees (the by products of fermentation) for four months, and then they used batonage or stirring with a stick. Most wines have the lees filtered off immediately. This gives the wine an complex, eminently drinkable taste.

If you see this wine anywhere, I would suggest grabbing a bottle or a case. You won't be disappointed.

Today's blog entry is a mishmash of catching up. It is dealing with technical and blogsphere issues.

In my past life as a consultant, I had been faced with a choice between web technologies for dynamic web pages. Microsoft had ASP and Sun had Java and JSP. I always chose JSP because I intuitively felt that it was more robust, had a greater richness of functionality, and was less of a memory pig than the .NET web framework.

Just the other day, my choice was validated. I navigated to an online photo directory and invoked the search function. The webserver threw this error:

If I were the webmaster, this would be highly embarrassing and a complete display of non-robustness. There is a reason why dotNet is called kiddy scripting.

Technorati is REALLY Dead, and I buried it on Cosmological Cabbage

For a long while, I monitored this blog's progress on Technorati. They were the ultimate arbitrators of blog popularity. I gained almost two million places in the blogsphere according to their rating system, and then they imploded. Today, I took off the Technorati links to Cosmological Cabbage.

A few weeks ago, when I googled my blog, I would get this listing in Google. Notice the ranking. It is 1,112,328. When you actually clicked on the link, my ranking was 1,001,xxx which meant that I would soon crack the 1 million mark in blog popularity.Then Technorati went off the air for months. When they came back on, they lowered my ranking by a half a million places. (Remember this is like golf, the lower the score the better). This was my google search of today:

It was now 1.6 million. When I clicked on it to see how accurate it was, I got this stupid page.

This caused me to pull off all Technorati collateral off this blog. It really is dead. RIP.

It seems strange posting pictures of the warm tropics while eight wild turkeys walk through the fallen autumn leaves, pecking away at a half-dead, frost-killed lawn. It is ironic that they are wild turkeys, because I am thinking of my observant turkey concept. (more to come).

Everything is a bit surreal. I am using remote desktop to log into Nassau. I am writing code that resides on a server 1,400 miles away. It is cold and sunny today in the foothills of the Laurentians. I see the fir-clad hills with the fractal geometries of the hilltops, and the outlier trees every once in a while, growing much taller than its neighbours, silhouetted against the cobalt blue sky.

And the words "fractal" and "outlier" seem strange to me, yet it is quite descriptive of what I am seeing. They are somehow the perfect level of abstraction, as I think about the concept of an observant turkey who knows that something weird is up. (Note, this is my next book idea, that I am developing). To reiterate the idea of an observant turkey, I use the example of a bunch of turkeys who for 1001 days have been fed and nurtured by human beings. However they are about to have their beliefs about the "nice" humans, built on past observations, shattered on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Only the observant turkey notices that something is strange of late. What it is, he has no clue, but he feels that the strange events might be a precursor to some unpredictable event.

Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, says that these unpredictable events are black swans, and it is the mathematics of Mandelbrot that describes them, rather than the mathematics of the Gaussian curves and averages. For example, if a turkey builds a model of events based on history, there is no way that he can predict the killing event. The average of his existence says that he will be fed as normal.

My contention is that highly unpredictable events are not Mandelbrotian, but rather Ulamian, named after the Polish American Ulam who first described cellular automata (Click on the Cellular Automata label to get an explanation). Mandelbrot's equations have a large degree of perceived randomness and uncertainty, but they do not have the capacity for extreme chaos that some of Ulam's cellular automatons do.

And this got me thinking deeper into the problem of chaotic events in any system. Mandelbrotian events can arise from Ulamian events but the obverse is not true. The ordered fractal geometries and topologies can be generated by cellular automatons, but fractal geometries cannot be true cellular automata in all cases because certain classes of cellular automata break down into chaos.

Mathematics is a symbolic language for many things, and while I talk about geometries, these equations can be applied to many things in life, or things and events can be modeled with these concepts.

I don't expect you to understand or even follow, and I will forgive you if you think that I have been smoking some organic substances or require a tin foil hat, however I am thinking out loud in a stream of consciousness that seems to make sense to me. I will let you know if this is a bona fide hallucination.

I will also try to find a better way to explain it without all of the arcane and esoteric language.

With my blog graphics, I am taking a real abstract tack in the past couple of days. The above shot is of a marlin fishing boat leaving Nassau harbour in the morning for a day's fishing. I was riding on the back of the Bo Hengy fast ferry to Harbour Island off Eleuthera when I snapped the shot.

I am also on a highly abstract mental tack as well. I have been devoting a lot of brain cycles to cellular automata. What the heck is cellular automata, you ask. I'll give you the first few sentences in the Wikipedia entry:

A cellular automaton is a discrete model studied in computability theory, mathematics, physics, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling. It consists of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states, such as "On" and "Off". The grid can be in any finite number of dimensions. For each cell, a set of cells called its neighborhood (usually including the cell itself) is defined relative to the specified cell.

Still clear as mud. Here is a pic of a simple cellular automaton:

This is an incredibly simple cellular automaton. Here is a practical explanation of how it works: Divide your computer screen into say 500 grid spaces or cells. Take a set of 5 colours. Assign each grid space a random colour, but apply a few rules. For example, one rule can be that no two adjacent sides (top, bottom, left and right of the cell) can have the same colour. Another rule can be that you can't have the same colour for more than three grid spaces. Choose some arbitrary rules, and then start the program and let it run indefinitely, scrolling up and continuing on when you reach the last row.

You will be amazed. At first it will be a mumble jumble. Then out of chaos, order will form. At first you will see a small orderly geometric pattern arise. Then it will arise again and start getting more complex. Then you will start to see snowflakes and wildly complex geometries. Then you will start to get the chaos and it will break down and start over again.

Here is a complex cellular automaton caught in a particularly neat state:

I first read about cellular automata inScientific American in the the 1980's. I was fascinated with it then, but I never had a chance to do much with it. To me, it is proof that there can be order in chaos.

I got to thinking how this applies what Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, describes as unpredictable events or black swans. Unpredictable events would become less unpredictable if you had some inkling of the coming chaos.

This sparked the genesis of my next book manuscript. In cellular automatons, when you are in a state of high complex order, the automaton signals the coming chaos with discordant random pixels. You don't know what is going to blow up, or what random event will happen. You will just know that something is coming.

This approach takes the black swan out of the mathematical realm of the Mandelbrotian (after Benoit Mandelbrot and fractals) into the realm of what I coin the Ulamian.

Stanisław Ulam while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s, studied the growth of crystals, using a simple lattice network as his model. His colleague was John von Neumann, a mathematician who made great contributions to mathematics, physics and compute dynamics. Together they came across cellular automata, although they planned to use it for a model of self-replicating robots.

So what does taking random events out of the Mandelbrotian realm and putting them into the Ulamian realm? Mandelbrot's mathematics while pseudo random, has a high degree of intrinsic order. The Ulamian realm has much more chaos in it, which is more reflective of the human condition and events driven by human action.

How am I going to tie this together? I haven't decided on a working title, but it will probably be either "The Random Pixel" or "The Observant Turkey". Taleb gives the classic problem of unpredictability of the future using the past in the Thanksgiving Turkey scenario.

Take a thanksgiving turkey. For a thousand and one days, humans feed and care for the bird. Based on the past history, the turkey gets a warm and fuzzy feeling for the humans that care for it. Because for 1001 days, it has been nurtured, it will predict that life will continue on. Then comes the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The neck-wringing turkicide was not predicted by any of the turkeys. Taleb contends that this was a black swan for the turkeys.

I take this contention a little further. If the turkey was observant, it would have noticed the random pixel in the cellular automata of its existence. For example on that fateful morning, instead of a whistling farmer bringing corn, a big huge truck pulls up. That is the random pixel that signifies the coming chaos. The observant turkey in the bunch would have noticed that something was different. If the turkey was really observant, it would have noticed that in the last month, the food was more plentiful and its comrades were getting incredibly fat.

And that is what thoughts go through this head on a Sunday morning in November. I think that I will go out for some random pixel spotting. This is a book that could literally write itself. More to come.

Yesterday was an amazing out of the ordinary day that was in fact quite ordinary, except that I think that I lived it to the fullest.

I was up at 4:30 AM and dressed. I went down to the studio, where I had make-up applied to my face for the first time in my life. I appeared on Bahamas@Sunrise where I think that I said just one sentence on television.

I was kissed by five women yesterday. It's not as dramatic as it sounds. For four of them, it was just a peck on the cheek, but being kissed by five women is extraordinary in any given day for me. I don't usually see that many people in one day in my tech-tortured life. You can tell that I am a geek.

After that it was airplanes and airports, where I saw a couple of amazing things, and they all had to do with children and technology. The first was aboard the aircraft. I sat behind an extremely well behaved little girl. I prefer sitting behind children rather than they sit behind me, and kick the back of my seat throughout the entire flight.

This little girl sat quietly throughout the whole flight, selecting movies and television shows for her to watch. When the flight landed, I watched her as she navigated her way back to the start menu, chose an arcane menu item and dutifully turned off the screen. I had never before seen the screen turned off completely. I have been flying since those audio-visual screens came into existence on the back of aircraft seats, and I did not realize that the screen could be turned off. How this little girl figured it out is beyond me. Her mother who was sitting next to her did not know it either, and the little girl turned off her screen as well.

Then we were sitting in a major airport. As I was waiting for the Lovely One to buy some soup, I was looking over an atrium. In the middle was the display of an actual Toyota Prius hybrid car. There were kiosks front and back of the car, with a computer driven multi-media interactive display. A little boy and his father were walking by. The little boy was too young to read. However within seconds, he had figured out the controls of the multi-media display, and using his finger and the touch screen, he was rotating the car, taking the various parts off the car and putting them back on, and operating most of the functions of the interactive demonstration. And this kid was too young to read.

The first thought was that he was incredibly adept at deciphering the symbols, like the arrows to spin the car. The second thought was, that like the little girl in the plane, they were not afraid to explore every button and every option. It came naturally. Adults are conditioned not to touch a control they do not understand for fear of screwing something up. The third thought was that I must remember to design Graphics User Interfaces such that children who cannot read can decipher their functions.

This was all aptly summed up by the Lovely One who said "Their brains certainly are not like ours".

Yeah, yesterday was a good day in this journey called life. It is also good to be in an environment that is out of the tropics, and in a post-autumnal phase that has a starkness and beauty all of its own. I suppose that it would be a different story if I had to live it full time, but for now, I am enjoying it.

The photo is a photoshopped pic of mine of the catamaran yachts anchored off of Spanish Wells.

I have thousands of golf balls that I have retrieved from the beach at the One and Only Ocean club. A lot of celebs play there, including Jack Nicklaus. He autographed a ball, played with it and lost it in the ocean. I retrieved it on one of my golf ball forays.

When I realized what I had, I googled the value of it. It was about $125 on eBay, and I was quite pleased. That was last year.

This year I checked the value of a ball again. I was flabbergasted. It had jumped to $677.60, discounted to $539. It was a meteoric jump in value.

That is a 439% to 542% appreciation in value over a year. If you had bought one last year and held on to it, it would have been an incredible investment. Lady Luck gave me my Jack Nicklaus autographed golf ball for free.

Fashion mogul Peter Nygård owns a private island called Nygård Cay in the exclusive Lyford Cay area of Nassau Bahamas. Nygård Cay was one of the most hedonistic places in the hemisphere. Parties with bevies of fashion models, fueled by sex and cocaine, and the gathering of the glitterati were hallmarks of Nygård Cay.

Nygård Cay burnt to a crisp. Nothing of note left. He says that he will rebuilt.

Here is his Wikipedia bio:

Peter Nygård, is a Canadian fashion executive. Chairman of Nygård International of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, a company that makes women's wear. He has a park named after him in Deloraine, Canada. He lives in the Bahamas.

Nygård, owner of the Tan Jay line, has also captured international fashion headlines. Nygård is well known for his lavish Hollywood-style extravaganzas both in Canada, the United States and The Bahamas.

In 2003, his estimated worth was nearly 500 million Canadian dollars, which is under dispute.

I am convinced that the southbound bridge from Paradise Island to Nassau is falling down. A few months ago, a ship hit the pilings protecting the pillars. In the picture below, the pillars had pilings and wooden beams protecting them. The ship hit the protective barrier and tore away the wooden beams. A segment of the bridge dropped about 6 inches (upper yellow arrow points to the joint that dropped).

A view of the torn away pilings is shown below in a picture that I took while standing on top of the bridge.

Below you can see the expansion plate that is at a weird angle and never closes. You can see the sea below.

I have to cross this bridge every day to go to work. I speed up a little bit, and make sure that I am not on the dropped span with a heavy truck. As you pass the expansion plate, the roadway sinks six inches and there is a bump.

If someday soon you read that a bridge in Nassau collapsed, remember that you read the prediction here first.

This is another edition of the Cosmological Cabbage Book Review. It is "Hemingway in Africa, The Last Safari", by Christopher Ondaatje.

It is the most vapid, narcissistic waste of printer's ink that I have ever come across. It had been marked down from $35 (Canadian) to $7 and even at that, it was a waste of money.

I learned nothing new. The author attempts to "understand" Hemingway's Africa by retracing his safaris.

I am a great Hemingway fan, and I learned nothing new in this book. This book in no way contributed to the body of knowledge of Hemingway. It was a commercial venture that failed. Even the writing is of journeyman quality.

I read it to the last page hoping for something redeeming, and I was sorely disappointed.

In Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point", he discusses how things catch fire and become popular with the masses. This blog has several examples of what tipped and what didn't in terms of what hit big on my blog and what didn't. Here are a few examples of topics that did and didn't go over the tipping point and garner thousands of hits on Cosmological Cabbage.

The Wedding Reception at McDonald's was my first huge hit on this blog. It tipped quickly. The venue is on West Bay Street in Nassau, at the McDonalds opposite the British Colonial Hilton Hotel.

I put up over twenty sayings of the Nassau street philosopher called Potcake Says, and it didn't tip at all. Nobody was interested.Then came the Ghetto Prom. It tipped quickly and still is a big hit today. What gets the big hits is the Freeport girl at St. George High School who showed up to the prom in a casket.

In spite of the fact that Jett Travolta died in the Bahamas, and the attempted $25 million dollar extortion of a Freeport lawyer and ambulance attendant, and a wild trial, the Travolta case did not tip. Is John Travolta's star dimming?

Canadian serial killer Karla Homolka tipped big, tipped early, and is still a huge hit getter on this blog -- thanks to the Nassau Tribune.

This was the biggest tipping point on the blog, bringing in huge numbers. Of course it is the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.

This blog is largely an experiment, and quite fascinating. The biggest surprises was the non-tipping of Travolta, and the huge tipping of Karla Homolka.

This is a fraud alert for companies operating in the Caribbean. The scam artist in question is David Phillips of Tampa Florida. Some of his aliases are David Fox, and others. His Facebook name is Slick369 and his gmail address is rummi53@gmail.com. His full name is

PHILLIPS, DAVID RANDALL

6021 WILLIAMSBURG WAY

TAMPA FL 33625

His putative wife is also listed as an officer of the the company

PHILLIPS, OLGA V

6021 WILLIAMSBURG WAY

TAMPA FL 33625

This is presumed as a child of his as an officer of the company.

PHILLIPS, MICHAEL DUSTIN

6021 WILLIAMSBURG WAY

TAMPA FL 33625

His operating names are www.cbt.cc and www.caribebay.com

Caribebay Mall

www.caribebay.com - Tampa

813-262-0295

Caribebay Mall

www.caribebay.com - Tampa

813-262-0295

According to the Florida Business registry he also operates Rummi Incorporated which in 2008 was registered as a non-profit organization for teaching the children about the environment. The corporation was transferred to him by Cynthia K. Kiper.

The way that he operates is that he contacts companies in the Caribbean and elsewhere, and takes the name of the person who spoke to him. He claims to be selling ads on his website. After an initial phone call, he puts up a 5 minute html page on his website, and calls for payment of $954 dollars. He claims that a "verbal contract" was made, and he quite insistently phones for payment. His operation preys on a collection scam for dubious work. Here is a report from our company:

Report Date: 5th November 2009

Incident: Island Yellow Page Scam

Island Yellow Pages (IYP) made initial contact with by placing a phone call to our Freeport Office on September 11, 1009, speaking with ..., the office supervisor.

From that conversation with , the caller claims that a “verbal contract” was entered into, where Island Yellow Pages would have provided to a website, and various online yellow-page listings. This offer could not be accepted as ... is not authorized to bind the company into a contract, the authority of which is held solely by Head Office management.

Island Yellow Page representatives were referred to the Head Office after repeated calls were placed to the Freeport Office demanding payment for services supposedly rendered. This call was taken by , ...Managing Director, at which time a request was made to IYP to provide by email, a copy of a contract, and evidence of any works that may have been done on behalf of the . To date, this information has not been provided.

On September 21, 2009 Pete, a person claiming to be an IYP representative, sent an email to , Asst. Manager Operations, that included an invoice totaling $954.00 representing 12 months of “Island Yellow Page Listing”. Subsequent to the receipt of that email, discussed with Pete (pete@cbt.cc) via telecom that:

....is not authorized to enter into any contracts on behalf of

That such a contract had to be approved by Head Office Management

That had no desire to engage IYP, nor would it be interested in a yellow-page listing with them, or any other service they provided.

That no work was delivered to...

That ...would not make payment to Island Yellow Pages or honor any claim from IYP against it

On November 5, 2009 at approximately 9:39am, another call was received by Head Office, this time from a person identifying himself as David Fox, Customer Service Representative of Island Yellow Pages. , <....> participated in this call with David Fox by telephone conference. David Fox, after being asked for the contact details of the company he represented, could not immediately provide us with a Registered or Head office address for his company, claiming that he “didn’t know it off hand” and would “look up that information in his computer”. After having us placed on hold, David Fox indicated that his company’s information was:

7821 N Dale Mabry Highway (Ste. 200)

Tampa, Florida

33614.

Tel: 813-933-5206 ext 313

Fax: 305-395-5200

Email: davidfox@cbt.cc

David Fox indicated that he was in fact at the address that he provided at the time of the telephone call. Strangely, he had said earlier that he did not know his company’s address “of hand”.

...reiterated to David Fox that was not then, and is not now authorized to enter into a binding agreement. Further, that even after making a request, no contract or completed work was delivered to , and finally, that would not pay any moneys to Island Yellow Pages.

...also indicated to David Fox that further research carried out revealed that The Tampa Better Business Bureau rates Island Yellow Pages (and its listed principal, one David Philips) as a D+ Fraudulent company, and that an official complaint would be initiated by with the Tampa District Attorney’s office. It was noted to David Fox that the practices of his organization were unethical and possibly illegal.

David Fox then ended the call.

David Fox called again, and was advised that we could not accept the call at that time.

It is suspected that David Fox is in fact David Phillips. He is a 1996 graduate of Gaither High School in Tampa Florida, and he is a fraudster and scam artist. Here are some more internet reports of his scams:

David Phillips, Mark, Terry, Ginger, Jennifer I was hired at 10 dollars, but paid less than minimum wage. Tampa Florida

David Phillips, Mark, Terry, Ginger, Jennifer

Phone: 813-262-0295

Fax:

7821 N Dale Mabry Highway Ste. 200

Tampa, Florida 33614

U.S.A.

I was hired by david phillips, or if that's what he calls himself. I was let go for no reason. I was paid less than minimum wage and never received my last paycheck.

They screen their calls down there, when I call they immediatley hang up and don't re-answer their phone again. I was working as a collector and trying diligently at first to do my job. What I found out by working their accounts was the (Island media yellow pages), were scamming people on the carribean islands by promising them web pages and posting them immediately.

The only offered a web page and charged $954 for their so-called service. My job was to collect the debt from them that the scammers like terry, mark, ginger, dave phillips and the rest of their partners in crime have cheated these honest people trying to get business in this depressed economy. I talked with the clients who didn't pay and they said they didn't want the service after they saw what they were offered, which was nothing but a email page with their business name on it.

The clients said that (island media yellow pages) scammed them by not letting them cancel if the didn't like what the saw. It even says in their so-recorded message that they could cancel by going to their web page and simply hitting cancel contract. Well, the clients did so and obviously to no avail. There credit card was billed and when they tried to get their money back they couldn't.

I was told by mark the so-called scammer yes man for david phillips to run a credit card which he attempted to and it would not go through because he told me to call the client and get the cvs number on the back of the card and I wouldn't do it. The next day I was fired. The said I was simply unsuitable for the job.. Terry my so-called co-worker, was reporting everything I did to mark and david phillips and jennifer another scammer who sits and does nothing all day, except make sure that her money is still rolling in..

Yes, these people belong behind bars and getting their money back is should be number 1 on the prosecutor's desk....

And yet another:

Warning to anyone looking to do business with Caribebay or Island Yellow Pages. Owner David Phillips aka crook. David is being investigated by the State of Florida for FRAUD and by the Florida Labor Board. With over 200 BBB complaints anyone wanting to do business with these company’s should seriously think twice!!

We are forwarding this information to the Florida Fraud Line. In the meantime, you should avoid these individuals. Remember, you do not owe them money even if they say so. David has the con artist balls of brass and the con artist bravado.

If you deal with this individual, please report him to the fraud hotline in Florida: Fraud Hotline: 1-866-966-7226

Update: We reported these individuals and companies to the Florida Attorney General's Office. Attorney General Bill McCollum acknowledge our complaint and said it was going to be investigated.

Hopefully Hurricane Ida will be the last of the hurricanes for the 2009 season. It is too far south and west of the Bahamas to affect us, and forecasters are saying that it may dissipate into a tropical depression after hitting the Yucatan peninsula and Cancun. We have been lucky this year. Worrying about hurricanes is a new experience for me.

The Tribune here in Nassau now has an online version. You will recall that by publishing two year old internet rumours, they started this blog, the Cosmological Cabbage on its way to becoming THE Karla Holmolka Canadian Serial Killer Blog (Just google "Karla Holmolka 2009"and watch this blog come up first in the Google rankings).

So I was scanning the Tribune, mainly because my name was in the newspaper, and I came across the above headline. I am still trying to decipher wha aasddfasfsdafsadfsdafsadfaasdfdsafdsa means. It looks like a keyboard symphony for the left hand or something. It is not local native patois because there are too many syllables. But rather it could be an indication of the local standards of editing and quality control.

So what was I looking for in the online version of the paper? It was the article below which featured me prominently: